Limbaugh: Obama Stoking Racial Strife

In an op-ed piece in Friday’s Wall Street Journal entitled "Obama is Stoking Racial Antagonism," conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh pointed to some video clips manipulated by the Obama ad-making team. He called them intentional distortions.

Barack Obama's campaign took quotes from Limbaugh's radio show -- "stupid and unskilled Mexicans" and "You shut your mouth or you get out!" -- and used them in a Spanish-language ad that lambasts John McCain.

"Mr. Obama's campaign is now trafficking in prejudice of its own making," wrote Limbaugh. "And in doing so, it is playing with political dynamite. What kind of potential president would let his campaign knowingly extract two incomplete, out-of-context lines from two radio parodies and build a framework of hate around them in order to exploit racial tensions? The segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s were famous for such vile fear-mongering...

"The malignant aspect of this is that Mr. Obama and his advisers know exactly what they are doing. They had to listen to both monologues or read the transcripts. They then had to pick the particular excerpts they used in order to create a commercial of distortions. Their hoped-for result is to inflame racial tensions. In doing this, Mr. Obama and his advisers have demonstrated a pernicious contempt for American society.

"We've made much racial progress in this country. Any candidate who employs the tactics of the old segregationists is unworthy of the presidency."